Category Archives: Gatherings

We are the Amazon Queens! DO NOT GOOGLE you will get some interesting options.

My friends and I started a book club a couple of months ago as something to do that doesn’t cost anything and also doesn’t revolve around food and drink, so the Amazon Queens began (on Facebook of course).

I do a lot of reading. I usually have one book on the go all the time and now I own a Kindle I have about 60 books in my bag all the time!

As you can see these ate ALL fantasy based. I can re-read these books over and over and haven’t gotten bored. But I love discovering new books. And yet I still always head to the one same places in book shops and online. So the book club is opening up my horizons. We each chose 2 or 3 books and then used an online random generator to pick the book each month. We started with a list of 16 books, so it will be a while before we choose anymore, but this is the way we decided was fair and everyone gets a say.

We have read one book called Snowdrops by A D Miller. Unfortunately it didn’t go down too well with the group. Only 3 out of 6 read it all before the next meeting. The the 3 of us that read it didn’t really like it. It’s a crime book set in Russia, but I didn’t like the characters and that is key for me. I have to relate to the characters in some way in the books I like and I could not do that with this one. The story was interesting but I felt a lot was left to happen outside of the text then just mentioned as time moved forward. Overall as a group we won’t be recommending this to anyone. Not a great start to book club, but never mind, the aim was to try reading new things and we succeeded at that straight away.

The book for the for last month was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I really struggled reading it. I kept having to remind myself to breathe as there were some very long sentences in there. Also I could not keep up with Alice’s constant thought changes. I struggled to read it. I did not look forward to reading it and it’s only a short book. Everyone else also struggled a bit with this book. The style of writing, the story and the characters did not seem to click with any of us. We had a good discussion as we had a few proper book club questions to answer this time which was fun. We discussed the themes, the story, the characters, the setting and around the story a bit more. A few people said they would be interested in reading about the author and the story a bit more. We did not understand how we considered this book to be a children’s book as it was complicated to read. I think the story we new was originally from the Disney cartoon version then the later Tim Burton movie. We all agreed we would tell people it is worth a read if they want to feel like they’ve read a classic, but I won’t be re-reading it I’m pretty sure.

Here’s Sian with the book and my Kindle:

The book for this month is You’re Next by Gregg Hurwitz and the the blurb is as follows:

‘I know you, don’t I?’ Five words – that’s all it takes to plunge Mike Wingate and his family into mortal danger. Mike doesn’t recognise the crippled stranger who approaches him at a party …but the stranger seems to know all about him. What has Mike done? Do they have the wrong man? Overnight, the threats become attacks, and Mike, his wife, and their young daughter learn they aren’t safe anywhere -especially not their own home. He doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t know what they want. But there’s no time to figure it out – because his enemies have killed before, and he’s next.